Voice of the Masses: Do you agree with the FSF’s High Priority Projects?
|We’re back! And we’re gearing up to record our first podcast of 2017. But before we do that, we want to hear from you for our cosmos-famous Voice of the Masses section: do you agree with the Free Software Foundation’s High Priority Projects list?
You can see that the FSF has put a fully free phone OS and “cloud” computing at the top – but do you think they should concentrate on other areas, like desktop applications, to make freedom-respecting computing available to everyone? Let us know your thoughts in the comments and we’ll read out the best in our hour-long-ish audio compendium of fun…
16 Comments
Nice to see that the FSF goes in “mobile first, cloud first”.
What we lack is the hardware. We need free processors, graphics cards and motherboards and free phone socs, radios and so on.
On the cloud side, we need people to join diaspora and other networks, otherwise they will never take off.
So I think it should be ” hardware first, people first”. But then again, it’s the Free _Software_ Foundation.
On the other hand – It is nice to see the FSF accepting that the cloud is( or can be made) an acceptable free software forum. The last time I heard, they were all for banning it!
Sure, why not priority should be mobile os. After all the original iphone os is almost 10 years old. Sarcasm aside, actually as a species, human have yet to perfect the art of mobile os. To be clear, 2 year support has never worked. We are counting on you FSF.
Here is something that seems to share the FSF vision of a more decentraliseable cloud — serverless computing
I mostly agree with their priorities, but I think they’re dooming themselves to uselessness on several of them.
“Free phone operating system” in particular is going to be a problem. Mozilla, with substantially more money and developer time and influence with hardware manufacturers to throw at the same problem, flopped here for much the same reason I think “Replicant” is: support is “special” for every single separate device because of the bits of special proprietary hardware and special kernel modifications and special binary-blob drivers that every one seems to depend on. The end result is you only get a handful of older phone models that can be made to mostly work, and the project in general never gets enough interest to catch up. (and that’s with Mozilla being willing to put up with proprietary drivers, the FSF by nature will have an even harder time.)
tl;dr “free phone operating system” is too large and vague for the FSF to get anywhere with.
Audio/video conferencing, on the other hand, is a much more achievable goal, especially with webrtc to build off of. Quite a few projects are doing this sort of thing and the FSF might meaningfully add some momentum to one or more of them, or successfully adopt a GNU project.
Federation would definitely be handy and I’d love to see some meaningful progress on MediaGoblin, which was also working on federation.
If I understand you correctly “free phone operating system” will only work with “free phone hardware system”
I think lists of priorities and such are laudable because we need goals to work towards. If these things could be done with a view to getting users to adopt them, getting people to use them is the key. Maybe not everyone but the kind of people that have chosen Firefox and Chrome over IE or Libreoffice over MS Office.
Yesterday I submitted a Questionnaire
from Marks & Spencer regarding ways of payment, including those through mobile phones. Because of the lack of updates for older models I have been very uncomfortable with the idea of payments through a mobile (Cell Phone). If the FSF can resolve this even I may take up the idea.
I don’t know if I would agree with all the priorities. Coincidentally, I am considering buying a new phone, and have been postponing it for a good while, because I want a real linux (ubuntu, sailfish, anything open) phone. Unfortunately, there’s nothing decent really available, or I am not aware of it. So yes, the first priority I agree with. And it makes sense in terms of expanding user base for linux as well. It’s also much easier to access the ‘market’ given that users are already accustomed to having different interfaces from different producers. A true linux phone from that point would not feel as strange as on the desktop market. Just make sure android apps.
Another thing I think should be kept at the top of the list is governments adopting linux/open source. There is a whole argument there and a big one from citizen rights perspective. In its simplest form the argument is that the governments (if they want to be considered democratic at least) should not force citizens to pay for proprietary software in order to access public services. Beyond potential discrimination by monetary means which proprietary software in many cases implies, there are principles of openness and transparency that democratic governing and open source place in the same box.
Anyway, good to have you back guys.
The free phone OS and federated systems to compete with centralised SaaS would go a long way to solving my two biggest frustrations with proprietary technology at the moment.
While I agree with most of these, I think there is an important one missing. That of systems that use closed protocols, especially where there are open standards available.
Microsoft has used the standards in the past effectively to take over previously open areas of computing and gain control. Things like active X we are still trying to rid the Internet of.
The FSF list is “… in no particular order.”
So, everyone thinking a Free phone OS is the top priority is mistaken.
Thank you for clarifying this 😛 would never guess.
It is probably the wrong balance of priorities, capitalising on sound bites and slogans rather like a Trump campaign, trying to attract big money and rednecks.
A free mobile OS in a saturated market is going to have very little impact. Emphasis on cloud where a few large players dominate and who are already (mainly) platform agnostic, will have little use for the vast majority of consumers.
FSF priorities should be (IMHO) focus on making free software usable, ubiquitous, and unbreakable.
Usability requires a developing APIs that can as easily interface with humans as other machines and programs using intelligence. Ubiquity implies that there should not be a niche that is accessible only through closed source software; drivers, modern CAD applications, scientific tools, Game engines. Unbreakability requires having integrated self diagnostic tools, troubleshooting and repair troubleshooting so that when things go wrong, an attempt is made to fix it and recover rather than fall over with a cryptic complaint.
@connie Ah…I see… you knock “sound bites and slogans” and then come up with one of your own, LOL
I agree they’ve still got a lot of work to do. Phones are our new general purpose computing device and it is very hard to get one which is free. The other worry is Intel ME on the rest of our hardware which means we don’t have a free foundation to build up from.